Elasticity in the cloud
By David Chiu, March 2010
Articles Tagged: Theory
Articles & Features
Cloud computing in plain English
By Ryan K. L. Ko, March 2010
Volunteer computing
Computers continue to get faster exponentially, but the computational demands of science are growing even faster. Extreme requirements arise in at least three areas.
By David P. Anderson, March 2010
Clouds at the crossroads
Despite its promise, most cloud computing innovations have been almost exclusively driven by a few industry leaders, such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and IBM. The involvement of a wider research community, both in academia and industrial labs, has so far been patchy without a clear agenda. In our opinion, the limited participation stems from the prevalent view that clouds are mostly an engineering and business-oriented phenomenon based on stitching together existing technologies and tools.
By Ymir Vigfusson, Gregory Chockler, March 2010
Scientific workflows and clouds
In recent years, empirical science has been evolving from physical experimentation to computation-based research. In astronomy, researchers seldom spend time at a telescope, but instead access the large number of image databases that are created and curated by the community [42]. In bioinformatics, data repositories hosted by entities such as the National Institutes of Health [29] provide the data gathered by Genome-Wide Association Studies and enable researchers to link particular genotypes to a variety of diseases.
By Gideon Juve, Ewa Deelman, March 2010
The cloud at work
By Sumit Narayan, Chris Heiden, March 2010
State of security readiness
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction. With this pay-as-you-go model of computing, cloud solutions are seen as having the potential to both dramatically reduce costs and increase the rapidity of development of applications.
By Ramaswamy Chandramouli, Peter Mell, March 2010
The business of clouds
At the turn of the 20th century, companies stopped generating their own power and plugged into the electricity grid. In his now famous book The Big Switch, Nick Carr analogizes those events of a hundred years ago to the tectonic shift taking place in the technology industry today.
By Guy Rosen, March 2010
Staying disciplined during an interdisciplinary degree
By Daniel W. Goldberg, December 2009
Social learning and technical capital on the social web
The social Web is a set of ties that enable people to socialize online, a phenomenon that has existed since the early days of the Internet in environments like IRC, MUDs, and Usenet (e.g. 4, 12). People used these media in much the same way they do now: to communicate with existing friends and to meet new ones. The fundamental difference was the scale, scope, and diversity of participation.
By Sarita Yardi, December 2009
Grafitter
"Know thyself". Carved in stone in front of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, that was the first thing people saw when they visited the Oracle to find answers. The benefits of knowing oneself are many. It fosters insight, increases self-control, and promotes positive behaviors such as exercise and energy conservation.
By Ian Li, Anind Dey, Jodi Forlizzi, December 2009
Privacy challenges and solutions in the social web
Research related to online social networks has addressed a number of important problems related to the storage, retrieval, and management of social network data. However, privacy concerns stemming from the use of social networks, or the dissemination of social network data, have largely been ignored. And with more than 250 million active Facebook (http://facebook.com) users, nearly half of whom log in at least once per day [5], these concerns can't remain unaddressed for long.
By Grigorios Loukides, Aris Gkoulalas-Divanis, December 2009
Don't ask me
Searching for information online has become an integral part of our everyday lives. However, sometimes we don't know the specific search terms to use, while other times, the specific information we're seeking hasn't been recorded online yet.
By Gary Hsieh, December 2009
Don't change a thing
As a student of computer science, there's a significant chance you will end up working in software development after graduation. Despite whether your career path takes you into industry or academia, you're likely to have some kind of interaction with software development companies or organizations, if only in trying to get the most out of a project or collaboration.
By Michael DiBernardo, September 2009
Dynamic displays
While touchscreens allow extensive programmability and have become ubiquitous in today's gadgetry, such configurations lack the tactile sensations and feedback that physical buttons provide. As a result, these devices require more attention to use than their button-enabled counterparts. Still, the displays provide the ultimate interface flexibility and thus afford a much larger design space to application developers.
By Chris Harrison, Scott Hudson, September 2009
Server virtualization architecture and implementation
Virtual machine technology, or virtualization, is gaining momentum in the information technology community. While virtual machines are not a new concept, recent advances in hardware and software technology have brought virtualization to the forefront of IT management. Stability, cost savings, and manageability are among the reasons for the recent rise of virtualization. Virtual machine solutions can be classified by hardware, software, and operating system/containers. From its inception on the mainframe to distributed servers on x86, the virtual machine has matured and will play an increasing role in systems management.
By Jeff Daniels, September 2009
Introduction
By Justin Solomon, June 2009
LibraryThing
By Anna Ritchie, June 2009
Supercomputers
By Sumit Narayan, June 2009
A computer scientist's introductory guide to business process management (BPM)
Computers play an integral part in designing, modelling, optimising and managing business processes within and across companies. While Business Process Management (BPM), Workflow Management (WfM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR) have been IT-related disciplines with a history of about three decades, there is still a lack of publications clarifying definitions and scope of basic BPM terminologies like business process, BPM versus WfM, workflow, BPR, etc. Such a myriad of similar-sounding terminologies can be overwhelming for computer scientists and computer science students who may wish to venture into this area of research. This guide aims to address this gap by providing a high level overview of the key concepts, rationale, features and the developments of BPM.
By Ryan K. L. Ko, June 2009
Courier problems
Courier problems comprise a set of recently proposed combinatorial optimization problems, which are inspired by some novel requirements in railway wagon scheduling. In these problems, scheduling strategies of some mobile couriers are considered. These mobile couriers initially reside at some fixed location. They are assigned some duties of commodity transfer between different pairs of locations. The scenario may be static or dynamic. The motivation is to optimize the movement of the couriers over the constraint of the traversed path or the associated cost. We discuss here some varieties of the courier problems formalized on graphs and address the potential methods of their solution.
By Malay Bhattacharyya, June 2009
HCI and theology
By Steve Clough, March 2009
State considerations in distributed systems
By Daniel W. Goldberg, March 2009
AmazonViz
This article describes a technique to visualize query results, representing purchase orders placed on Amazon.com, along a traditional 2-D scatter plot and a space-filling spiral. We integrate 3-D objects that vary their spatial placement, color, and texture properties into a visualization algorithm. This algorithm represents important aspects of a purchase order based on experimental results from human vision, computer graphics, and psychology. The resulting visual abstractions are used by viewers to rapidly and effectively explore and analyze the underlying purchase orders data.
By Amit Prakash Sawant, Christopher G. Healey, Dongfeng Chen, Rada Chirkova, March 2009
Modding
By Caio Camargo, March 2009
Detecting steganography on a large scale
By William Ella, December 2008
Exploring global terrorism data
By Joonghoon Lee, December 2008
Digital blasphemy
By Cara Cocking, December 2008
On teaching computer science
By David Chiu, December 2008
Motion planning for skateboard-like robots in dynamic environments
By Salik Syed, September 2008
Geometric and path tracing methods for simulating light transport through volumes of water particles
The visual appearance of volumes of water particles, such as clouds, waterfalls, and fog, depends both on microscopic interactions between light rays and individual droplets of water, and also on macroscopic interactions between multiple droplets and paths of light rays. This paper presents a model that builds upon a typical single-scattering volume renderer to correctly account for these effects. To accurately simulate the visual appearance of a surface or a volume of particles in a computer-generated image, the properties of the material or particle must be specified using a Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF), which describes how light reflects off of a material, and the Bidirectional Transmittance Distribution Function (BTDF), which describes how light refracts into a material. This paper describes an optimized BRDF and BTDF for volumes of water droplets, which takes their geometry into account in order to produce well-known effects, such as rainbows and halos. It also describes how a multiple-scattering path tracing volume integrator can be used to more accurately simulate macroscopic light transport through a volume of water, creating a more "cloudlike" appearance than a single-scattered volume integrator. This paper focuses on replicating the visual appearance of volumes of water particles, and although it makes use of physical models, the techniques presented are not intended to be physically accurate.
By James Hegarty, September 2008
Data encryption
By Ed DeHart, September 2008
Information superwhichway?
By Craig Pfeifer, June 2008
Common mistakes in online and real-time contests
By Shahriar Manzoor, June 2008
Finding an optimal tooth color match
By Cara Cocking, March 2008
Technical writing 101
By Leslie Sandoval, March 2008
Meeting educational needs of the elderly in ICT
By Sergio Sayago, Patricia Santos, Maite Gonzalez, Míriam Arenas, Laura López, December 2007
Second life and education
By Rachel Gollub, December 2007
Visualizing flow data using assorted glyphs
This project visualizes a scientific dataset containing two-dimensional flow data from a simulated supernova collapse provided by astrophysics researchers. We started our project by designing visualizations using multiple hand drawings representing the flow data without taking into consideration the implementation constraints of our designs. We implemented a few of our hand drawn designs. We used an assortment of simple geometric graphical objects, called glyphs, such as, dots, lines, arrows, and triangles to represent the flow at each sample point. We also incorporated transparency in our visualizations. We identified two important goals for our project: (1) design different types of graphical glyphs to support flexibility in their placement and in their ability to represent multidimensional data elements, and (2) build an effective visualization technique that uses glyphs to represent the two-dimensional flow field.
By Amit Prakash Sawant, Christopher G. Healey, December 2007
Trends in real-time rendering
Fans of PC role-playing games need no introduction to Bioware-the Edmonton, Alberta based developer of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights, and Jade Empire, among others. The company recently opened a studio in Austin, Texas to develop a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG, or simply MMO) for an unannounced intellectual property. Ben Earhart, client technology lead on the new project, took a few hours out of his busy schedule to discuss with Crossroads the future of real-time rendering-3-D graphics that render fast enough to respond to user input, such as those required for video games.
By James Stewart, December 2007
On the complexity of Katamari Damacy
By Gregory M. Zaverucha, December 2007
Hearing the Hype
By Daniel Alex Finkelstein, December 2007
Storage capacity comparison of neural network models for memory recall
The physiology of how the human brain recalls memories is not well understood. Neural networks have been used in an attempt to model this process.
Two types of networks have been used in several models of temporal sequence memory for simple sequences of randomly generated and also of structured patterns: auto- and hetero-associative networks. Previous work has shown that a model with coupled auto- and hetero-associative continuous attractor networks can robustly recall learned simple sequences. In this paper, we compare Hebbian learning and pseudo-inverse learning in a model for recalling temporal sequences in terms of their storage capacities. The pseudo-inverse learning method is shown to have a much higher storage capacity, making the new network model 700% more efficient by reducing calculations.
By Kate Patterson, December 2007
Observations on teamwork strategies in the ACM international collegiate programming contest
By Saman Amirpour Amraii, December 2007
The science of shape
By Justin Solomon, September 2007
Digital re-creation of a seven-story building shake during an earthquake
By Amit Chourasia, March 2007
Need for perceptual display hierarchies in visualization
The advent of computers with high processing power has led to the generation of large, multidimensional collections of data. Visualization lends itself well to the challenge of exploring and analyzing these information spaces by harnessing the strengths of the human visual system. Most visualization techniques are based on the assumption that the display device has sufficient resolution, and that our visual acuity is adequate for completing the analysis tasks. However, this may not be true, particularly for specialized display devices (e.g., PDAs or large-format projection walls).
In this article, we propose to: (1) determine the amount of information a particular display environment can encode; (2) design visualizations that maximize the information they represent relative to this upper-limit; and (3) dynamically update a visualization when the display environment changes to continue to maintain high levels of information content. To our knowledge, there are no visualization systems that do this type of information addition/removal based on perceptual guidelines. However, there are systems that attempt to increase or decrease the amount of information based on some level-of-detail or zooming rules. For example, semantic zooming tags objects with "details" and adds or removes them as the user zooms in and out. Furnas's original fisheye lens system [9] used semantic details to determine how much zoom was necessary to include certain details. Thus, while zooming for detail, you see not only a more detailed graphic representation, but also more text details (e.g., more street names on the zoomed-in portion of a map). Level-of-detail hierarchies have also been used in computer graphics to reduce geometric complexity where full resolution models are unnecessary and can be replaced with low-detail models where the resulting error cannot be easily recognized. Our approach is motivated by all these ideas, but our key contribution is that we use human perception constraints to define when to add or remove information.
By Amit Prakash Sawant, Christopher G. Healey, March 2007
Avoid common pitfalls when programming 2D graphics in java
This paper presents the core knowledge required to properly develop 2D games in Java. We describe the common pitfalls that can easily degrade graphics performance and show how we achieved impressive frames-per-second display updates when implementing Minueto, a game development framework.
By Alexandre Denault, Jörg Kienzle, March 2007
Prostate ultrasound image processing
By Deian Stefan, March 2007
At a crossroads
By Paula Bach, Chris Jordon, December 2006
Preparing for a job in the games industry
By James Stewart, December 2006
The Sims 2
By Chris Dondanville, December 2006
Modding
By Caio Camargo, December 2006
From chasing dots to reading minds
By Damien Marshall, Tomas Ward, Séamus McLoone, December 2006
What is web 2.0?
By Daniel Lewis, September 2006
Jump-starting your bioinformatics career as an undergraduate
By Mike Verdicchio, September 2006
Becoming a virtual organism to learn about genetics
By Alexander Bick, September 2006
Desktop open source
By Bryan Stroubeé, May 2006
Eureka! past, present, and future of creativity research in HCI
By Umer Farooq, May 2006
Learning from nature
By Anh Nguyen, Tadashi Nakano, Tatsuya Suda, August 2005
Virtual communities and team formation
By Yanru Zhang, Michael Weiss, September 2003
An introduction to active network node operating systems
By Parveen Patel, December 2002
Software verification and validation with destiny
This paper presents an introduction to computer-aided theorem proving and a new approach using parallel processing to increase power and speed of this computation. Automated theorem provers, along with human interpretation, have been shown to be powerful tools in verifying and validating computer software. Destiny is a new tool that provides even greater and more powerful analysis enabling greater ties between software programs and their specifications.
By Josiah Dykstra, April 2002
Book review: information storage and retrieval systems
By Robert Korfhage, July 2000
The world of data compression
By Eric Scheirer, March 2000
In memory of David Huffman
By Kevin Fu, March 2000
Objective viewpoint
By Matt Tucker, March 2000
Design of an interactive tutorial for logic and logical circuits
By Jeremy Kindy, John Shuping, Patricia Yali Underhill, David John, March 2000
Image compression—from DCT to wavelets
By Subhasis Saha, March 2000
Prefix compression of sparse binary strings
Note from ACM Crossroads: Due to errors in the layout process for printing on paper, the version of this article in the printed magazine contained several errors (mostly related to superscripts). This HTML version is the accurate version. Please refer to this HTML version instead of the printed version and accept our apologies for any inconvenience.
By David Salomon, March 2000
A hierarchical error controlled octree data structure for large-scale visualization
By Dmitriy V. Pinskiy, Joerg Meyer, Bernd Hamann, Kenneth I. Joy, Eric Brugger, Mark Duchaineau, March 2000
Ask Jack
By Jack Wilson, March 2000
Introduction
By Kevin Fu, September 1999
Objective viewpoint
By George Crawford, September 1999
Choosing a Ph.D. program in computer science
By Rachel Pottinger, September 1999
Linux DSP shell
By Michael Stricklen, Bob Cummings, Brandon Bonner, September 1999
Introduction to Linux networking and security
By Wei-Mei Shyr, Brian Borowski, September 1999
Parallel computing with Linux
By Forrest Hoffman, William Hargrove, September 1999
The Texas Tech tornado cluster
By Per Andersen, September 1999
Introduction
By Alessio Lomusico, June 1999
Where do intelligent agents come from?
By Cristobal Baray, Kyle Wagner, June 1999
Protecting the integrity of agents
By Michael J. Grimley, Brian D. Monroe, June 1999
Towards a standardization of multi-agent system framework
By Roberto A. Flores-Mendez, June 1999
Web hunting
By G. Michael Youngblood, June 1999
Introduction
By Scott Lewandowski, March 1999
Objective viewpoint
By George Crawford, March 1999
Making a careers presentation
By Jack Wilson, March 1999
PiSMA
By Dimitris Lioupis, Andreas Pipis, Maria Smirli, Michael Stefanidakis, March 1999
Architectures and compilers to support reconfigurable computing
By João M. P. Cardoso, Mário P. Vestístias, March 1999
Computing in the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe
By Shane Hart, March 1999
Parallel processing in heterogeneous cluster architechtures using JavaPorts
By Demetris G. Galatopoullos, Elias S. Manolakos, March 1999
Networks and distributed systems: introduction
By Kevin Fu, November 1998
Web site review: ADSL forum
By Shawn Brown, November 1998
Creating a 3D universe in Java3D
By George Crawford, November 1998
Ask Jack: making a careers presentation
By Jack Wilson, November 1998
AgentOS
By Larry Chen, November 1998
Design and implementation of a digital library
By James Richvalsky, David Watkins, November 1998
Confidentially using authentication
By Robert Schlaff, November 1998
Knowledge discovery in databases
By Peggy Wright, November 1998
The Damocles Sword of Academic Publishing
Doctoral students often find it hard to understand at what level of productivity they should be. Through an analysis of resums of doctoral students in the Management Information Systems (MIS) field, a better understanding of what is expected of current students as compared to former students is achieved. Both conference presentations and publications in journals are examined. Finally, there is an examination of whether the quantity of publications can be related to the ranking of the school that a student attends.
By Kai Larsen, November 1998
Introduction
By Lynellen D. S. Perry, September 1998
Objective viewpoint: Java AWT layout management 101
This article provides a brief summary of basic layout management in the Java Abstract Window Toolkit (AWT) and is intended to serve as a foundation for more sophisticated AWT programming.
By George Crawford, September 1998
Ask Jack: careerline Q & A
By Jack Wilson, September 1998
A formative evaluation of scenario-based tools for learning object-oriented design
Advances in computing have awakened a century old teaching philosophy: learner-centered education. This philosophy is founded on the premise that people learn best when engrossed in the topic, participating in activities that motivate learning and help them to synthesize their own understanding. We consider how the object-oriented design (OOD) learning tools developed by Rosson and Carroll [5] facilitate active learning of this sort. We observed sixteen students as they worked through a set of user interaction scenarios about a blackjack game. We discuss how the features of these learning tools influenced the students' efforts to learn the basic constructs of OOD.
By Hope D. Harley, Cheryl D. Seals, Mary Beth Rosson, September 1998
Much ado about patterns
By Robert Zubek, September 1998
Explanation component of software system
Explanation is an important feature that needs to be integrated into software products. Early software that filled the horizontal software market (such as word processors) contained help systems. More specialized systems, known as expert systems, were developed to produce solutions that required specific domain knowledge of the problem being solved. The expert systems initially produced results that were consistent with the results produced by experts, but the expert systems only mimicked the rules the experts outlined. The decisions provided by expert systems include no justification, thus causing users to doubt the results reported by the system. If the user was dealing with a human expert, he could ask for a line of reasoning used to draw the conclusion. The line of reasoning provided by the human expert could then be inspected for discrepancies by another expert or verified in some other manner. Software systems need better explanations of how to use them and how they produce results. This will allow the users to take advantage of the numerous features being provided and increase their trust in the software product.
By Bruce A. Wooley, September 1998
Multimedia systems: introduction
By Erika Dawn Gernand, May 1998
Towards usability evaluation of multimedia applications
By Marianne G. Petersen, May 1998
The use of Java as an introductory programming language
By Jason Hong, May 1998
Networking on the network
By Phil Agre, May 1998
The Turing test
By Lynellen D. S. Perry, May 1998
A simple SMTP framework for Java
By George Crawford, May 1998
Ask Jack: job search in cyberspace
By Jack Wilson, May 1998
Robotics
By Randolph Chung, Lynellen D. S. Perry, April 1998
Mars rover
By Sharon Lauback, April 1998
RoboCup
By Hiroaki Kitano, Minoru Asada, Itsuki Noda, Hitoshi Matsubara, April 1998
CMUnited
Robotic soccer is a challenging research domain involving multiple agents that need to collaborate in an adversarial environment to achieve specific objectives. This article describes CMUnited, the team of small robotic agents that we developed to enter the RoboCup-97 competition. We designed and built the robotic agents, devised the appropriate vision algorithm, and developed and implemented algorithms for strategic collaboration between the robots in an uncertain and dynamic environment. The robots can organize themselves in formations, hold specific roles, and pursue their goals. In game situations, they have demonstrated their collaborative behaviors on multiple occasions. The robots can also switch roles to maximize the overall performance of the team. We present an overview of the vision processing algorithm which successfully tracks multiple moving objects and predicts trajectories. The paper then focuses on the agents' behaviors ranging from low-level individual behaviors to coordinated, strategic team behaviors. CMUnited won the RoboCup-97 small-robot competition at IJCAI-97 in Nagoya, Japan.
By Manuela Veloso, Peter Stone, Kwun Han, Sorin Achim, April 1998
Evolutionary control via sensorimotor input and actuation
By Todd M. Schrider, April 1998
Protecting Java code via code obfuscation
The Java language is compiled into a platform independent bytecode format. Much of the information contained in the original source code remains in the bytecode, thus decompilation is easy. We will examine how code obfuscation can help protect Java bytecodes.
By Douglas Low, April 1998
A practical crash course in Java 1.1+ programming and technology: part II
By George Crawford, April 1998
Ask Jack: Internet career
By Jack Wilson, April 1998
Book Review
By Lynellen D. S. Perry, April 1998
Road crew
By John Cavazos, April 1998
Java:introduction
By Vishal Shah, November 1997
The wonders of Java object serialization
By Brian T. Kurotsuchi, November 1997
Using the Java Native Interface
The Java Native Interface (JNI) comes with the standard Java Development Kit (JDK) from Sun Microsystems. It permits Java programmers to integrate native code (currently C and C++) into their Java applications. This article will focus on how to make use of the JNI and will provide a few examples illustrating the usefulness of this feature. Although a native method system was included with the JDK 1.0 release, this article is concerned with the JDK 1.1 JNI which has several new features, and is much cleaner than the previous release. Also, the examples given will be specific to JDK 1.1 installed on the Solaris Operating System.
By S. Fouzi Husaini, November 1997
A practical crash course in Java 1.1+ programming and technology: part I
By George Crawford, November 1997
Road crew
By John Cavazos, November 1997
Interdisiplinary computer science: introduction
By Michael A. Grasso, Mark R. Nelson, October 1997
Geographic information systems and problem solving environments
By Jinsoo Park, October 1997
A sustainable fishing simulation using mathematical modeling and database access through the World Wide Web
By Vineet Kapur, Douglas Troy, James Oris, October 1997
Mapping and sequencing the human genome
By Wayne Smith, October 1997
Foundations of electronic commerce
By Neal G. Shaw, October 1997
Everything's coming up virtual
By Susan E. Yager, October 1997
St. Cloud State University ACM chapter wins 2nd annual Webbie prize
By Hal Berghel, October 1997
Ask Jack: skill development
By Jack Wilson, October 1997
Down the road: is something missing from your campus?
By Thomas C. Waszak, October 1997
Road crew
By John Cavazos, October 1997
Computer graphics: introduction
By Adam Lake, May 1997
Ray tracing
By Paul Rademacher, May 1997
A human's eye view
Frameless Rendering (FR) is a rendering paradigm which performs stochastic temporal filtering by updating pixels in a random order, based on most recent available input data, and displaying them to the screen immediately [1]. This is a departure from frame-based approaches commonly experienced in interactive graphics. A typical interactive graphics session uses a single input state to compute an entire frame. This constrains the state to be known at the time the first pixel's value is computed. Frameless Rendering samples inputs many times during the interval which begins at the start of the first pixel's computation and ends with the last pixel's computation. Thus, Frameless Rendering performs temporal supersampling - it uses more samples over time. This results in an approximation to motion blur, both theoretically and perceptually.This paper explores this motion blur and its relationship to: camera open shutter time, current computer graphics motion-blur implementations, temporally anti-aliased images, and the Human Visual System's (HVS) motion smear quality (see 'quality' footnote) [2].Finally, we integrate existing research results to conjecture how Frameless Rendering can use knowledge of the Human Visual System's blurred retinal image to direct spatiotemporal sampling. In other words, we suggest importance sampling (see 'sampling' footnote) by prioritizing pixels for computation based on their importance to the visual system in discerning what is occurring in an interactive image sequence.
By Ellen J. Scher Zagier, May 1997
Levels of detail & polygonal simplification
This paper covers the techniques of Polygonal Simplification in order to produce Levels of Detail (LODs). The problem of creating LODs is a complex one: how can simpler versions of a model be created? How can the approximation error be measured? How can the visual degradation be estimated? Can all this be done automatically? After exposing the basic aims and principles of polygonal simplification, we compare recent algorithms and state their various qualities and weaknesses.
By Mike Krus, Patrick Bourdot, Françoise Guisnel, Gullaume Thibault, May 1997
Faster 3D game graphics by not drawing what is not seen
The increasing demands of 3D game realism - in terms of both scene complexity and speed of animation - are placing excessive strain on the current low-level, computationally expensive graphics drawing operations. Despite these routines being highly optimized, specialized, and often being implemented in assembly language or even in hardware, the ever-increasing number of drawing requests for a single frame of animation causes even these systems to become overloaded, degrading the overall performance. To offset these demands and dramatically reduce the load on the graphics subsystem, we present a system that quickly and efficiently finds a large portion of the game world that is not visible to the viewer for each frame of animation, and simply prevents it from being sent to the graphics system. We build this searching mechanism for unseen parts from common and easily implemented graphics algorithms.
By Kenneth E. Hoff, May 1997
Advice for undergraduates considering graduate school
By Phil Agre, May 1997
An introduction to the GIMP
By Matt Cutts, May 1997
Ask Jack: skill development
By Jack Wilson, May 1997
Road crew
By John Cavazos, May 1997
Human computer interaction: introduction
By Sofia C. DeFernandez, April 1997
Ask Jack: negotiating
By Jack Wilson, April 1997
Computer games: introduction
By John Cavazos, November 1996
The story of XPilot
By Bjorn Stabell, Ken Ronny Schouten, November 1996
The video game [R]evolution
By Sarah Elizabeth Burcham, November 1996
Computer game marketing bias
By Melissa Chaika, November 1996
Research posters 101
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, November 1996
Programming contest strategies
By Fabian Ernst, Jeroen Moelands, Seppo Pieterse, November 1996
Objective view point: a cornucopia of C++ resources
By G. Bowden Wise, November 1996
Ask Jack: summer jobs and job skills
By Jack Wilson, November 1996
Down the road: getting women involved
By Sara Carlstead, November 1996
Book Reviews: game programming
By Lynellen D. S. Perry, November 1996
Road crew
By John Cavazos, November 1996
Artificial intelligence: introduction
By Frank Klassner, September 1996
An interview with Drew McDermott
By Kentaro Toyama, Drew McDermott, September 1996
Emotionware
By Lynellen D. S. Perry, September 1996
Computer vision and artificial intelligence
By Christopher O. Jaynes, September 1996
Applications of AI in education
By Joseph Beck, Mia Stern, Erik Haugsjaa, September 1996
Reasoning about computational resource allocation
Anytime Algorithms are algorithms that exchange execution time for quality of results. Since many computational tasks are too complicated to be completed at real-time speeds, anytime algorithms allow systems to intelligently allocate computational time resources in the most effective way, depending on the current environment and the system's goals. This article briefly covers the motivations for creating anytime algorithms, the history of their development, a definition of anytime algorithms, and current research involving anytime algorithms.
By Joshua Grass, September 1996
Objective view point: casting in C++
By G. Bowden Wise, September 1996
Ask Jack: finding a job
By Jack Wilson, September 1996
Book review:Bandits on the information Superhighway
By Paul Rubel, September 1996
Road crew
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, September 1996
Computer security past and future
By Michael Neuman, Diana Moore, April 1996
An introduction to intrusion detection
By Aurobindo Sundaram, April 1996
Trust mechanisms for Hummingbird
By Jason Evans, Deborah Frincke, April 1996
Electronic voting
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, April 1996
Mutual authenticating protocol with key distribution in client/server environment
The explosive growth of networked and internetworked computer systems during the past decade has brought about a need for increased protection mechanisms. This paper discusses three authentication protocols that incorporate the use of methods that present effective user authentication. The first two protocols have been previously discussed in the literature; the third protocol draws from the first two and others to produce an authentication scheme that provides both mutual authentication and secure key distribution which is easy to use, is compatible with present operating systems, is transparent across systems, and provides password file protection.
By Charles Cavaiani, Jim Alves-Foss, April 1996
Objective View Point: statics
By G. Bowden Wise, April 1996
Ask Jack: negotiating with companies
By Jack Wilson, April 1996
Road crew
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, April 1996
An interview with Brad Templeton
By George E. Hatoun, Brad Templeton, February 1996
Software engineering
By Dan Ghica, February 1996
It's now or never
By C. Fidge, February 1996
Dependency diagrams
A method of illustrating program structure by showing how sections depend on each other is presented. This suggests an intuitive metric for program partitioning, which is developed with supporting theory.
By Mark Ray, February 1996
Facilitating abstraction and reuse with ExpectTK
By Navid Sabbaghi, February 1996
Objective View Point: an overview of the Standard Template Library
By G. Bowden Wise, February 1996
The road less traveled: Internet collaboration
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, February 1996
Software review: to warp or not to warp
By Scott Ramsay MacDonald, February 1996
Ask Jack: resume should reflect real you
By Jack Wilson, February 1996
Down the Road: University of Pennsylvania
By Sara M. Carlstead, February 1996
Road crew
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, February 1996
The Road Less Traveled: it shouldn't be allowed!
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, November 1995
Computer-based decision-making
By Jeff Robbins, November 1995
Copyright law meets the World Wide Web
By Matt Rosenberg, November 1995
Ethical considerations in gender-oriented entertainment technology
By Melissa Chaika, November 1995
Review:Minerva's Machine
By Sara M. Carlstead, November 1995
“So how are your hands?”
By Rob Jackson, November 1995
Opinion: why are people afraid of computers?
By Scott Ramsey MacDonald, November 1995
Ojective View Point: getting the handle of handles
By G. Bowden Wise, November 1995
Ask Jack: confused about careers?
By Jack Wilson, November 1995
Down the Road: visit the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
By Sara M. Carlstead, November 1995
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, November 1995
Road crew
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, November 1995
Networking: introduction
By Mark Allman, September 1995
The Internet's history and development
By Scott Ruthfield, September 1995
Website review: Charles Babbage Institute
By Ben W. Brumfield, September 1995
The MBONE
By Jay A. Kreibich, September 1995
Network security, filters and firewalls
By Darren Bolding, September 1995
Harvest
By Sarah Elizabeth Burcham, September 1995
The Fox Project
By Jeremy Buhler, September 1995
Objective View Point: the ABCs of writing C++ classes
By G. Bowden Wise, September 1995
Conference report: conferences offer insifhts into how computers may affect our future
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, Adam Lake, September 1995
Book review: Fatal Defect: Chasing Killer Computer Bug
By Saveen Reddy, September 1995
Down the road: meet our first European chapter
By Sara M. Carlstead, September 1995
Road crew
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, September 1995
From the editors: Crossroads finishes first year
By Ronald B. Krisko, May 1995
Speed is life, life is speed
By Scott Ramsey MacDonald, May 1995
Social responsibility and the CS student
By Saul Jimenez, May 1995
Digital liberties
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, May 1995
Direct democracy
By Adam Lake, May 1995
net.love
By Sara M. Carlstead, May 1995
Should computer scientists worry about ethics?
By Saveen Reddy, May 1995
Objective View Poiint: the ABCs of writing C++ classes
By G. Bowden Wise, May 1995
Down the Road: the first high school chapter
By Sara M. Carlstead, May 1995
Conference report: The 1995 ACM Big Event
By Ronald B. Krisko, May 1995
The Road Less Traveled: an alternative review of Doom II
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, February 1995
Software Review: my humble opinions on Windows NT vs. OS/2
By Ronald B. Krisko, February 1995
Book Review: successful C++ book
By Saveen Reddy, February 1995
Road crew
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, February 1995
Editorial
By Saveen Reddy, December 1994
Software review: Doom 2
By Terry White, December 1994
Book review: email style book jumps on the Internet bandwagon
By Lorrie Faith Cranor, December 1994
Editorial
By Saveen Reddy, September 1994
Book Reviews: serial communications books
By Saveen Reddy, September 1994
Software review: tie fighter
By Terry White, September 1994
Road crew
By Saveen Reddy, September 1994